Waddell & Reed

Website Redesign

The Challenge:Waddell & Reed — an asset management and financial planning company — had an outdated, disorganized, and difficult to manage web experience that was confusing for both customers and employees.

Contributions: Creative Direction, Creative Strategy

Where We Started

Waddell & Reed had more than 4 separate websites, all hard-coded, and none were mobile-optimized. We started by evaluating their external and internal audiences and matrix of sites and came away with three main objectives for the new web experience:

Sharing Progress

As we progressed through the initial design phase of the project, we used style tiles to quickly iterate ideas and gain client approvals. The UI team used our style tiles to populate a development tool called Pattern Lab. This helped us quickly validate design decisions and provided internal and external stakeholders with prototypes that could be tested on different devices.

This highly collaborative process ensured all stakeholders had a clear understanding of how the desktop experience translated to mobile and helped avoid late-stage changes that could have derailed the aggressive timeline.

Pattern Lab - atoms

Pattern Lab - fund page template

The Results

Launched in September, 2016, Waddell & Reed’s redesigned website features strategically organized content within an engaging user experience and design. The investment in improving Waddell.com allowed Waddell & Reed to focus on their most important investments: those of its clients.